The Easter Egg In Hans Zimmer’s ‘Inception’ Score

I saw Christopher Nolan‘s Inception film last week and loved it – just like everyone else.

I never realised that the stretching of time in dreaming was also built into the music score: Basically, every level of sleep in the film stretches the time – 5 minutes of sleep gives you 1 hour of dreaming time in the first level of sleep (12 dream minutes per 1 real minute). On the second level, one gets 1 hour for every 5 minutes spent in the first dream, which means that 5 minutes in the real world turn into 12 hours at dream level two.

So,  Hans Zimmer used the same slowing down with the Édith Piaf song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”, the song used as a countdown marker for the team. Pieces of Piaf’s interpretation of the song were stretched, manipulated and woven into Zimmer’s score. The following YouTube video shows how it works:

“You realize that the elements that we’ve extracted from the Piaf song are the way you get from one dream level to the next,” Zimmer says. Simple and yet such a brilliant idea! Great film on many levels – well worth watching.

Here’s a video of Hans Zimmer and Johnny Marr perform live in the Inception premiere: